


Judge, Jury, and Executioner

by flawlix



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-12
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-14 08:01:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4556937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flawlix/pseuds/flawlix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So what do you fear, Felix? What makes up the content of your nightmares?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Judge, Jury, and Executioner

**Author's Note:**

> Also on [tumblr](http://flawlix.tumblr.com/post/126522431034/so-what-do-you-fear-felix-what-makes-up-the).

Charge into the portal, mockery on your lips and contempt in your heart. For your partner, for the value he places in the validation of an ancient alien religion. For the process, the idea that some relic can tell you anything about yourself. 

You leap into the void because you know it won’t kill you, and that’s all you need to know.

There is not much left in the universe that can faze you, Felix, and you hardly know the meaning of hesitation.

Stepping through the portal does give you pause, however, but only because the flash of light leaves you temporarily blinded, and you have to wait for your eyes to adjust. You bring your gun up on reflex and blink away the shadows as you sight along its barrel.

What greets you when your vision clears is... nothing. There’s nothing here but more temple-like alien structures and vast, empty space. Misty, shadowy, and dark, but empty nonetheless.

Lower your gun and roll your eyes. Figures.

“Told you this was a waste of time,” you say, turning to Locus. 

Locus isn’t there.

You’re alone.

That realization is enough to make you cautious. Despite what Locus thinks, you are not, in fact, a fool. He should have been right behind you, probably still sputtering indignantly at your insults. Locus is nowhere, not beside you, not a little blinking light on your HUD readout.

Say his name. Get only static in response.

You get the sense you’re being watched.

When you move, the feeling is confirmed: a voice rumbles at you in a language that, even with this many years and a truce between you and the War, makes your spine crawl with warning. The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, rumbles through your bones. The air is tight around you, anticipatory.

Nothing happens.

“What?” you snap. “What do you want?”

Whip your head around, look for something to direct your irritation at. There’s nothing to see but steel walls, dirt, and creeping, blurry darkness. Do not let the watcher see you tighten your grip on your gun.

 _WHO ARE YOU?_   the voice says, like it’s repeating a question it already asked and it’s annoyed at you for not answering.

“Felix,” you say, like that’s an answer and you’re annoyed at it for not knowing. “Now how does this thing work? Do you show me all the people I’ve killed or something? All the bad things I’ve done? Because, let me tell you, we’re gonna be here a long time if that’s your plan.”

Turn slowly, looking around, because you know for a fact that you’re being watched. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing. The dark and misty parts of the temple are still dark and misty. The walls are still steel or some other alien alloy that looks exactly like steel.

The voice rumbles at you again, a wordless noise of disapproval. You should know. You’re an expert at wordless noises of disapproval, even when they come from disembodied voices in alien temples.

Still nothing.

“Come on!” you shout, frustrated. “This is supposed to be some kind of test, right? Some ‘true warrior’ bullshit? Test me!”

No response. The room feels a little emptier, maybe, like whoever the voice belongs to has retreated.

So now you’re an asshole alone in an alien temple, shouting at nothing. Great.

Maybe Locus is having better luck than you, wherever he is. The pragmatic part of you hopes so, because otherwise this little side quest was for nothing. The jealous part of you hopes not, because if it turns out that Locus is a True Warrior or whatever, you are never going to hear the end of it. He will make your life intolerable. He’s enough of a self-righteous prick as it is without Alien God confirming his delusions.

“Ugh, this is a waste of time,” you mutter. Then, at volume, “Okay, you win! I’m leaving now! Just send me back or whatever it is you do.”

More nothing.

“Fine. I’ll just show myself out, then.”

Shouldn’t be hard. The doorway is a giant glowing energy beam, and you haven’t gone that far. It should be right behind— It’s not right behind you. 

Behind you is a steel wall that stretches up and up into the blurry atmosphere above you, so high you can’t see the ceiling, if there is one at all. There is nothing resembling a giant glowing alien energy beam.

You stare at the wall. It continues to be a wall.

“You know what? Fuck this.”

You pick a direction and start walking.

As you move, you once again get the sense you’re being watched. You flip off your silent alien observer. Hopefully that sign is universal.

How long you walk, you don’t know. Time loses meaning in this place, the temple shrouded in permanent, misty twilight. Every corner you turn looks... not the same, but similar, variations on that first metal-and-dirt room with the ceiling stretching away above you, so high up it might as well be sky.

Do not admit that you are lost.

Fear is not an option. Get frustrated instead. Get angry. Shout insults at the disembodied voice. Fire randomly into the shadows whenever you think you’ve located your watcher. The silence of the place is oppressive and no sound greets you except the retort of your gun, echoing in the empty spaces, but it’s better than the creeping sense of being  _studied_ that twines its way up your spine.

You will never confess out loud how relieved you are when you around another corner and Locus is there. 

He has his back to you, but you could stare at a lineup of soldiers in identical Locus armor, and you’d be able to pick your partner from the lot.

“Locus!” you say. Let your annoyance bleed through into your voice; hide your relief. “Good! Let’s get the fuck—“

Locus turns toward you and raises his gun until you are staring down the barrel at him.

The rest of the sentence dies in your throat.

If there is nothing else between the two of you, no friendship, no respect, no love lost, there is knowledge, intimate knowledge, of each other. Years of perfect partnership has given you understanding. You  _know_  Locus. You know how he moves, how he thinks. Can anticipate him with clairvoyant accuracy.

And you know, right now, that he intends to kill you.

Two simultaneous reactions: excitement that you will finally know which of you is the better and a nagging fear that you already know the answer.

Then, on the heels of the first two, a third reaction: confusion.

Why now? Why turn on you now? What changed in the minutes, hours, since you both entered the portal? Why abandon the mission?

It’s not right; it doesn’t fit. Something is wrong here.

Raise your shield arm, slowly, so slowly, because raising your gun might set him off and you aren’t keen on your chances at dodging bullets at point blank range. Do not speak. Watch, not his face – nothing to see in that eyeless helmet anyway – but his trigger finger. He has not taken up the slack, not yet, finger still loose in the trigger guard despite the intent in his pose. That gives you a microsecond more of reaction time.

Activate the hardlight shield. Give yourself a chance to talk him down, appeal to whatever modicum of doubt his loose grip betrays.

Except your shield flickers, fades, and dies in a shower of sparks.

“Oh, fuck.”

He must be as surprised as you are, because you move before he fires. Bullets bury in the wall next to your head, peppering your armor with dust and flecks of hot metal. Instinct takes over, combat training carved into your bones, and you rabbit for cover. Duck and dodge back the way you came, for the crevices and shadows that can hide you, give you a second to think.

He intends to kill you. You do not intend to die. 

But you’re also not so sure you intend to kill him, are you?

Be sure. Doubt will get you killed.

But you can’t help feeling that there’s been some mistake. There are  _rules_ to your partnership. There’s an understanding. And it’s childish to whine about rules when you’re being shot at – you sound like  _him_ – but this isn’t right.

Risk opening a COMlink to him. “Locus! What the fuck? It’s me!”

Silence. Static. Nothing but the sound of your own breathing – fast, labored, though you’ve hardly exerted yourself.

Your HUD is on the fritz, bars of static wavering across your vision. No movement registers on your trackers. You have no idea where he is, but you doubt you’ll have to wait long to find out.

You are not disappointed.

Locus materializes out of the misty twilight, green armor accents iridescent in the low light. He should not be able to see you, tucked away in the shadows, but you know before he fires that he’s looking straight at you.

So you shoot first, controlled bursts to keep him moving, keep him dodging, keep him from getting a lock on you as you scurry backwards. You miss every shot, and he walks through your hail of bullets unscathed and unflinching, and raises his gun.

The bullet clips your helmet before you can run, knocking you back and blurring your vision.  You roll and are on your feet before your ears stop ringing or your vision clears. You fire blindly at the place you think he last was.

Take advantage of the poor shot: run. 

Run back through the winding maze of lookalike corridors. And as you run, assess. Plan.

He has his cloaking and a sniper’s deadly accuracy, but he cannot shoot you if he cannot see you. You need to hide, to ambush him. Engage him in CQC, where his gun is less useful to him. Use your advantages.

Your advantages are dwindling, though. No shield. Unfamiliar terrain. Broken motion tracker. At range, he can run you to exhaustion. Up close, you have your knives and your speed – but he has weight and power, and you’re not certain you can win.

And you know his weaknesses, but he also knows yours. And you cannot risk losing. Not like this.

You... doubt.

Skid around another corner and drop down, crouching with your gun pointed back the way you came. You need to know where he is. Without your motion tracker, you need eyes on him.

He’s slower than you, and he should not be so close on your heels that you won’t see him approach. Trust that you can get a shot off faster than he can. 

Peer around the corner, finger tight on the trigger of your gun. No one is there.

Your shoulder explodes with red-hot pain, the tear-crunch of muscle, bone, and cartilage. The shot comes from behind you, and the force of it drives you to the ground, into the dirt, impact ripping the air out of you. You suck in a shout, roll, and fire wildly in the direction the gunshot came from, scrambling madly up off the ground, forcing yourself up with your bad arm even as it screams at you because  _you have to keep your gun_  and your gun is in your good hand. Gunfire opens a crater in the ground next to the tips of your fingers. You fire behind you as you lurch to your feet, push yourself forward, run.

Change of plans: get the fuck out of here.

Wet heat pulses through your shoulder as you run now, a steady cadence of pain keeping time with the pounding of your heart and the drumming of your feet on the packed earth. You’re probably leaving a bloody trail behind you, but Locus doesn’t need that to follow you. 

He should not have been behind you.

You are not panicking.

How was he behind you?

You’re injured, you’re lost, and your equipment is failing you, but you are not panicking. You have been in worse situations and come out on top. You will survive this.

You will  _win_.

(Nevermind that Locus was always at your side in your worst moments.)

When you round the next corner, you stagger and have to catch your balance against the wall. The path ahead of you is dark, darker than the others, and you don’t think you’ve come this way yet. Good – better chance of finding the way out.

Something moves in the passage up ahead – the liquid blur of Locus’s camo unit – and you’re struck with a sense of déjà vu so strong it tilts your world sideways, leaves you breathless and dizzy. Or maybe déjà vu is the wrong word, because for a second you aren’t sure which war you’re fighting. A different time, a different place, when the heatwave-shimmer of air and fairylight dance of plasma weapons could be the only warning you had before you were gutted like so much meat.

That’s what saves your life, for the moment. You stop expecting Locus, stop trying to predict, react only on instinct and memory. Fire, already moving, nearly tripping backwards over your own feet, and fire again. Unload a steady shower of bullets in the direction of that movement and reload only when you finally, finally hit your target, force the camo unit to drop and reveal him. Fire again for good measure.

He dives out of the way, fast, so fast you can’t keep track of him, and mechanically smooth. You’ve never seen Locus move that way. Speed was always your thing. He vanishes into the shadows like so much smoke, to shoot at you again.

Your only consolation is that, this time, he misses.

Flee back the way you came, gunshots at your heels. Do not question how he got ahead of you again; it’s not worth questioning.

Bury the thought that you may be outmatched after all. You can still escape; survival is still winning.

Except... you round yet another corner and realize you’ve been herded.

You’re back where you started. 

It doesn’t look much different than any of the other rooms or halls or passages, but you see that wall stretching away above you, and you know, you just know, that this is where you entered this temple. And there’s still no exit here.

It’s a dead end. It’s your end. You’re trapped.

You reach for your rage, your fight, the heat that’s always kept you alive, but all you find is fear. Chilling fear that fogs your thoughts and makes your fingers clumsy on your rifle.

You have never been so certain of your own death. Not even during the war.

There’s a thick knot of scar tissue low on your back, a twisted, cratered mess of plasma burn and shrapnel, nerve damage and destroyed muscle the size of your fist. It was the injury that ended the war for you. Without your armor, it would have killed you. 

The doctors called you  _lucky_ , told you that if it had hit an inch or so to the left, it would have snapped your spine, cauterized vital and delicate nerves, left you paralyzed. 

You made the mistake of telling Locus, once, drunkenly, how afraid you were the day you woke up in that hospital, back a starburst of agony and misfiring nerves, unsure if you’d ever walk again. You made him pay for the knowledge later, with caustic tongue and words so acid they bordered on cruel.

You never saw the Covvie that almost took your life, but it missed its mark.

You don’t see Locus, either, but he doesn’t miss. He shoots an inch or so to the left.

The bullet buries in your spine, just above your first lumbar vertebra, clips your legs out from under you like a puppet with its strings cut. You hit the ground before your brain catches up, weight falling on your injured shoulder, and your rifle clatters out of your hand, skitters away across the floor, out of your reach.

It’s not until you try to push yourself up, to go after your gun, that you realize  _what’s happened_. The sound you make is one of animal fear, low, distressed, wounded. 

Try and fail to get to your feet; try and fail again.

Locus materializes out of the dark, gun in hand, and this time you do panic.

Claw for your gun, strain for it, but your legs are dead weight and your fear is crippling, lizard brain panic overtaking rational thought.

He watches you, stares at you, silent behind that eyeless helmet. Watching you drag yourself along, apathetic to your struggle.

You can’t decide which is worse: him watching you or the moment he starts to move toward you, step by methodical step.

You continue to strain for you gun until he puts a foot in the middle of your back, right above where his sniper shot severed your spinal cord, and  _presses_. Pain shoots up every nerve that can still feel it. He pins you there, traps you, and like a fly with its wings yanked off, you flutter and squirm uselessly.

You expect him to shoot you then and there, end it with a bullet to the back of your skull.

And you will not, will  _not_ , die like this, like a bug pinned down for a child’s science project.

Go for a knife; you have plenty of those. Slash blindly at the leg pinning you down – the angle is terrible, but he is heavy and you cannot roll with your legs numbed and the torn mess of your left shoulder. You do no damage, but he backs off, you feel the weight lift off your spine, and you try to turn, to fight back somehow...

Locus kicks you, hard, once, twice, and again, until you feel your ribs fracture. Shout, because the pain of your multiplying injuries is too much to bear silently. 

He crouches beside you, slings his gun over his shoulder and grabs you, turns you on your back. The knife is still in your fist and you try to bury it in his throat, forgoing finesse for desperate last stand. He blocks the blow easily, breaks your wrist without a thought as he wrenches the knife from your hands, and punches you in the gut.

No, not  _punches_.

He _stabs_  you. Drives your own knife through your body armor, up and under your ribs, just beneath where the thick armor of your chest plate ends.

You jerk, yell soundlessly, curl reflexively, protectively around the knife. Your fingers close around the hilt, go to yank it free even though you know you shouldn’t, know that if you want to have any chance at all at surviving this, you have to leave it.

Locus’s hand closes around yours, painfully tight, and  _twists_.

Knowing the damage that a twisted knife can do to a human body is nothing,  _nothing_  compared to feeling it. If you had the breath left, you’d scream again. You think you taste blood.

Paw uselessly at his arm with your free hand, your broken wrist, try to shove him away. You’re not trying to survive anymore, you just want him to  _stop_.

Try desperately to get enough air to plead with him, hyperventilating, heartbeat frantic.

“Locus,” you manage to croak breathlessly. “Please...”  _Please_.

He stops.

The sudden lessening of pain is blissful relief, enough that reflexive tears spring to your eyes. You stare up at him through the static of your flickering HUD, looking for any sign that he cares that he’s killing you, anything other than silent, dispassionate black armor. You find nothing.

Or, rather, what you find makes you wonder how you could have misread him so badly all of these years. He could have killed you, quickly, efficiently, impersonally. The bullet in your shoulder, in your spine, the one that clipped your helmet – he could have killed you with any one of those shots. He chose not to.

For all your talk of hatred, how the two of you grate against each other like broken gears in an otherwise efficient machine – only now do you understand what it truly means to be hated.

“Locus, please,” you say again. You don’t know what you’re asking for. Mercy, maybe. Or death.

You expect him to remain impassive. Or maybe you expect him to shoot you.

You do not expect him to reach up and remove your helmet, fingers releasing the seals along your jaw. You do not expect him to slide his hands over your face, thumbs brushing across your eyes, your nose, your cheeks, until they fit around your throat.

Your eyes widen when you realize what he means to do. You struggle, pulling weakly at his hands, shoving at his chest, for all the good it will do you.

He doesn’t remove his own helmet, but you get the sense he’s staring you in the eye, watching your face as he wrings the life from you.

You die, Felix.

You die, and your death is the most intimate moment of your life.

You die, your own knife buried in your ribs and your partner’s hands around your throat. You die, and you feel every moment, every agonizing moment, the wet crunch of your windpipe, the sudden snap of your hyoid bone, the pressure-burst of the capillaries in your eyes.

You die, and Locus is the one who kills you.

You die, and—

You die, and—

The portal spits you back out.

Stumble on legs that suddenly work again, but don’t seem to want to support your weight. Crash to your knees, catch yourself with your free hand and bring your gun up because there’s movement beside you, and  _you are not dying like this_ , not now that you have a chance.

“Felix? Sir?”

It’s just one of the pirates.

They’re all staring at you, at your raised gun from your position on your knees next to the portal. 

You’re alive. Unscathed.

Gasp for air, but don’t let them see. Gag on the illusory taste of blood in the back of your throat. Resist the urge to clutch at your throat, phantom fingers so tight around your neck that you’re sure you’ll find bruises. Control the deep, sobbing breathes you want to take. Relish in the fact you can breathe at all.

One of the pirates starts to move toward you with the medical scanner. Whip your gun around to point it at him and stop him in his tracks.

“Keep that fucking thing away from me,” you spit. “I’m fine.”

Don’t let them see your fear. Lower your gun and climb to your feet. Rejoice because you can stand on your own.

Don’t let them see your trembling.

It was a hallucination. It wasn’t real.

Don’t let them see that you’re afraid. Glare at the portal instead.

“Well,” you say, and your voice is steady, “That was useless. Is Locus back yet?”

Don’t let them see that you’re afraid.

And when Locus reappears minutes later – don’t let him see, either. Do not flinch when he raises his gun; do not hesitate. Raise yours in turn. 

Do not lower it until he is no longer a threat.

In there, he got the best of you. Out here, it will not happen again.  Consider it a practice run. The portal didn’t kill you, not really, and that’s all you need to know. 

Hide behind mockery and contempt that you no longer feel.

**Author's Note:**

> Concrit is welcome.


End file.
